Business Intelligence (BI) generally refers to software tools used to improve business enterprise decision-making. These tools are commonly applied to financial, human resource, marketing, sales, customer and supplier analyses. More specifically, these tools can include: reporting and analysis tools to present information, content delivery infrastructure systems for delivery and management of reports and analytics, data warehousing systems for cleansing and consolidating information from disparate sources, and data management systems, such as relational databases or On Line Analytic Processing (OLAP) systems used to collect, store, and manage raw data.
There are a number of commercially available products to produce reports from stored data. For instance, Business Objects Americas of San Jose, Calif., sells a number of widely used report generation products, including Crystal Reports™, Business Objects OLAP Intelligence™, Business Objects Web Intelligence™, and Business Objects Enterprise™. As used herein, the term report refers to information automatically retrieved (i.e., in response to computer executable instructions) from a data source (e.g., a database, a data warehouse, a plurality, of reports and the like) where the information is structured in accordance with a report schema that specifies the form in which the information should be presented. A non-report is an electronic document that is constructed without the automatic retrieval of information from a data source. Examples of non-report electronic documents include typical business application documents, such as a word processor document, a presentation document and the like.
A report document specifies how to access data and format it. A report document where the content does not include external data, either saved within the report or accessed live, is a template document for a report rather than a report document. Unlike other non-report documents that may optionally import external data within a document, a report document by design is primarily a medium for accessing and formatting, transforming or presenting external data.
A report is specifically designed to facilitate working with external data sources. In addition to information regarding external data source connection drivers, the report may specify advanced filtering of data, information for combining data from different external data sources, information for updating join structures and relationships in report data, and logic to support a more complex internal data model (that may include additional constraints, relationships, and metadata).
In contrast to a spreadsheet, a report is generally not limited to a table structure but can support a range of structures, such as sections, cross-tables, synchronized tables, sub-reports, hybrid charts, and the like. A report is designed primarily to support imported external data, whereas a spreadsheet equally facilitates manually entered data and imported data. In both cases, a spreadsheet applies a spatial logic that is based on the table cell layout within the spreadsheet in order to interpret data and perform calculations on the data. In contrast, a report is not limited to logic that is based on the display of the data, but rather can interpret the data and perform calculations based on the original (or a redefined) data structure and meaning of the imported data. The report may also interpret the data and perform calculations based on pre-existing relationships between elements of imported data. Spreadsheets generally work within a looping calculation model, whereas a report may support a range of calculation models. Although there may be an overlap in the function of a spreadsheet document and a report document, these documents express different assumptions concerning the existence of an external data source and different logical approaches to interpreting and manipulating imported data.
A tool often used by management to measure an organization's vision and strategies in conjunction with report documents is a balanced scorecard. A balanced scorecard translates an enterprise's overall business strategy into specific quantifiable goals to allow management to evaluate organization performance in terms of achieving these goals. Management may identify a long term objective or strategy and use a balanced scorecard to assess the most effective measures that need to be taken to achieve the objective or strategy. The balanced scorecard provides feedback for both internal business processes and external outcomes to facilitate continuous evaluation and improvement of strategic performance and results by specifying cause and effect relationships among financial and non-financial data associated with an enterprise. The cause and effect relationships may include customer data, operational data, development data, and employee data. Each form of data offers a different view of the effect of measures taken in a given division of an organization. For example, the customer data may relate to company measures that have a direct impact on customers and their satisfaction (e.g. customer surveys, customer complaints, customer call processing times, etc.). The scorecard may also include lead and lag indicators. Lag indicators represent outcomes that influence the current performance of an organization for which a strategy has been defined. Lead indicators represent outcomes that management wishes to achieve now in order to drive some future performance.
The present invention relates to the analytical and reporting aspects of balanced scorecards. Management's ability to successfully use a balanced scorecard to achieve their desired strategic business objectives has become increasingly important to providing a comprehensive view of the performance of a business. One critical attribute of a balanced scorecard that helps to ensure a consistent and unbiased measurement for management is balance. An unbalanced scorecard may yield an inaccurate or unreliable measure of a company's activities, thereby clouding any given long term management objective. While there are existing tools that facilitate the creation and analysis of balanced scorecards, these tools do not allow for a quantitative measure of a balanced scorecard to determine the balance associated with it.
Therefore, it would be desirable to provide a new technique that provides a measure of balance within a balanced scorecard to ensure a consistent and unbiased measurement. In particular, it would be desirable to provide a method to quantitatively measure the balance within a scorecard to determine the reliability and accuracy of the scorecard.